The Battle for Stoneport
'''The Battle of Stoneport '''is the formal name for the first major encounter between the Tallet and Technocracy forces. Colloquially called the Stoneport Massacre by the Tallet and used as propaganda against the vileness of the Collective, this remains the most one-sided defeat of the Tallet by the Technocracy in history. The Technocracy likewise gave the battle the colloquial name of the Stoneport Slaughter. The ill-fated attack on Stoneport by the Tallet Empire occured during the Postclassical Era. It remains the only time the Tallet Legion attempted to attack on city of the Inner Circle outright, and is the event which proved to the academic world that the fledgling Technocracy was nowhere near as naive or selfless as they had seemed. Background Since their meeting in the early Classical Era, the Tallet Empire had been increasingly at odds with the Immortals running the Circle. While the first meeting was at first rather neutral and trade-oriented, it was only a few decades before things turned hostile. The Technocracy ,recognizing the threat the Empire represented, used the presence of the Unbounded to make expansion increasingly difficult for the Empire. The Circle at the time was mostly known as a peaceful people, whose bleeding hearts caused them to intervene in places around the world. They were not known for warfare, or even for being good planners, wasting resources on humanitarian concerns far from their own borders, and failing to maintain a large defensive army. They were known for their gadgets and their pleasant lifestyles, and were most certainly not a hardened people. Even the highly-aggressive Unbounded were small, disorganized, and mostly unhinged: whatever methods their handlers had used to train them were not being cohesively applied. Despite engagement in several large conflicts up to this point; it was clear to most nations that the Circle was one of the weaker powers of Soi. It was widely assumed that the Goran had only failed to conquer them through sheer lack of intelligence and the Woag decision to "never attack the wizards" was widely assumed to be a combination of superstition and the inability to amass enough firepower. The Tallet were a modernized force with large numbers, and considered themselves in the perfect position to take down a nuisance now that they were no longer protected by the Goran-Circle Alliance. The Plan The Tallet commander was the then up-and-coming General known as Teller Hall. Coming from a modest family, General Hall had made a carrier out of pulling off daring maneuvers which earned him quick acclaim in the Empire and the devoted loyalty of the troops under him. Rising quickly to the rank of General after ten years, the ambitious man found himself stalled out for advancement. Hall failed to understand that this was by design of the Order of the Tower as Hall's ambition had gained the note and distrust of the Faceless Emperor. In a bid to win the recognition of the Emperor and earn himself promotion to either a governor's life of luxury or the banner of a regional command, Hall set his sites on securing a target for the Empire which would pave the way for a follow-up campaign of conquest which he believed would ultimately bring a great benefit to the Empire. Hall's plan was a two-pronged assault against the Circle's isolated, northernmost city. A large force of infantry ships would sail to the Gulf of Open Arms and land a day's march north of the city. Meanwhile, a naval armada would move in quickly to bombard the city with long-ranged artillery, distracting them and weakening the defenses while the infantry marched on the walls. Fifty transport galleys and twenty-five artillery galleys in total were amassed for this purpose, along with 15,000 troops. While not the largest army of the Empire, this was the only force available to Hall without inviting other generals to join him, and he was not about to share his victory with an older general that was already closer to advancement than he. The Tallet had received word that Stoneport had been fortified and was armed with a new long-range artillery. weapon known as a "krakoon". As artillery tends to sacrifice accuracy, power, or range for the other two, the weaponry was assumed to be a minor threat in the face of twenty-five of the Empires mighty siege-galleys. The commanding officer at the head of the operation, Admiral Malcolm Harris, was selected for his extensive experience in capturing the port cities of small nations. An added boon to Hall was that Harris was a childhood friend and, as he was not a land commander, would do little to diminish Hall's glory. Harris was an arrogant man, blinded by the might of the Empire and considered the Circle "a nuisance against the glorious Emperor, to be stamped out with the rest of the savage world." The attack was expected to be a surprise, as while the ships were slow moving, they would not stop once they entered Technocracy-controlled waters. This would give the Technocracy little time to respond to the impending siege of the relatively remote city. The Conflict The events of what was supposed to be a battle to take the Technocracy's naval headquarters turned into one of the greatest military blunders in Tallet history. The Journey As the Tallet had been unable to secure any ports near the Gulf of Open Arms, they needed to make several stops on the way to the Circle. The last stop was unplanned, an unexpected storm had hit the fleet as they neared their target, and while no ships were lost, they needed to slow down and make repairs. Unbeknownst to the Tallet, a group of soldiers let the plan slip to a member of a local insurgency while they were at one of the ports for supplies. The insurgent immediately informed an Unbounded operative who was in that town to help incite a rebellion. The agent sent a message back to Stoneport, which arrived just hours before the attack. Naval Battle The naval battle began when a single pirate frigate, flying a white flag, sailed out to the Tallet armada, demanding they "turn back or die." Admiral Harris dismissed this as hollow boasting by a nation about to be conquered, and had the ship sunk as an example. Soon after they opened fire on it, they began to hear the sounds of distant thunder. It wasn't clear what was hitting them, only that large holes had been made in their ships well before they were in trebuchet range. Admiral Harris pressed forward, even as the ships were were battered around him, and ordered the trebuchets to begin bombardment as soon as they were in range. By the time they were in range, the armada had dropped from twenty-five ships to twenty. Assuming the smoke on the towers was to signal the port being under attack, they began to bombard the walls of the city where siege weapons would typically be stationed. The damage done to the reinforced walls was less potent than anticipated, and did nothing to stop the onslaught and just before he was killed by the return fire of Stoneport, Admiral Harris ordered the ships to retreat. As soon as they were out of trebuchet range, however, the harbor gates of Stoneport opened, releasing several pirate dreadnaughts, lead by a ship which was reportedly made of metal. The counter attack splintered the armada in their retreat, with the slowest remaining ships torn apart by the force which now outmatched the remaining fifteen ships. Five of the siege-galleys escaped to the open ocean to make the return to the Empire. On the high seas, however, they were set upon by a large group of Woag, who looted and sunk two of the remaining ships. In the end only three of the original twenty-five ships returned home. Infantry Battle Not long after landing about a day's march from Stoneport, the Tallet infantry ranks began to see heavy casualties from the hit-and-run tactics of the numerous Unbounded, especially from surprise attacks by hidden scatter-ballistas, and the presence of highly skilled crossbowmen who could hit officers from a distance and flee before the Tallet archers could respond. The small unit, guerrilla tactics made the relatively short march a nightmare for the Tallet commanders, their small army in relative disarray due to their ever-shrinking officer core. Reaching Stoneport's western wall, the Tallet had lost easily half of their officers in the matter of the day's march, and a number of their troops as well. Worse, the Armada had failed to bombard it as was intended, and the city guard had had time to redirect its full attention to the ground forces. Unprepared to assault an undamaged battlement, the Tallet forces attempted one full-out assault under fire from the city walls rather than face the long harassing march out of the region. Spearshot rained down on the Tallet troops as they attempted to charge the stone walls, and their Turtles not designed at the time to deal with direct-fire siege weaponry quickly were sundered on the field. The the charging forces were mowed under by the hail of projectiles, leaving nearly a third of their number dead before the retreat was sounded. It is noted that after this battle, the Turtles were redesigned, denying any truly flat surface and rendering them far more effective against the Circle's forces in the conflicts that followed. As the forces attempted to regroup after days of being harried down to a mere five thousand men by Unbounded harassment, a force of six thousand Armored Riders under command of Prince Gerald of Roaringvale arrived from the Broken Kingdoms. As per treaties agreed to by the Circle's second-largest trading partner, the Riders had come to the Circle's call for aid. Upon seeing the new force arrive, the Tallet chain of command finally broke down, and the last remaining officers surrendered, choosing to risk the Kingdom's mercy than try to get their men out alive through further Unbounded attention. The journey back to the Tallet Border under escort of the Broken Kingdom force was perhaps one of the most humiliating marches in the history of man. The survivors were harassed continuously for being defeated by "girly men in dresses with rock-tossing tubes" and referred to as little girls for not having the grit to fight the Riders before surrendering. General Hall himself was treated to the punishment of a Coward by the Riders, stuffed into a dress and padded up like a cross-dresser as they paraded him back to the Tallet. For his failure, General Hall was publicly executed as a betrayer of the Emperor. His death reminded the other Tallet generals of the price of being deemed to be too ambitious to be fully loyal. Aftermath The Circle, up until that point, had been dismissed by foreign scholars as a group of charitable Immortals wasting resources on idealistic goals. After the events of the Second Goran War and the Stoneport Slaughter, however, they started looking more closely. It became widely recognized that one of the major disadvantages which the Tallet faced was that there was no territory surrounding the Circle which was not controlled by a power friendly to it, and no port near them which was not contested. Had the Tallet been able to take holdings in the Eastern Block, it would have been easier to amass a larger army, but, because of the tendency of the Circle's military to aggressively aid any nearby nation against the Tallet, such conquest was impossible. These were not coincidences, but by careful design: the Technocracy had actually built itself on a series of clever plans and deals, and wasn't actually putting resources into anything that wasn't expected to pay off. They weren't wasting resources on charity; they were making long-term investments. After this, the terms "naive" and "charitable" were often replaced with "calculating" and "insidious" in foreign scholar circles. An entirely new, less dismissive, more suspicious view on the Technocracy by foreign powers was established. The battle also secured the notion that areas in which the Technocracy was well-established in were relatively well-defended, and revealed the actual level of their military technology. According to the Technocracy, this was the event that lead to the Barren Soil Treaty being invoked against the Circle in what they believe was an attempt to quell their power. When the shouting at the Undying Council died down, it was clear that the Technocracy had not violated the treaty due to the defensive use of their weapons, but they had earned the ire of a number of powers including the Truest King for using the language in a way that some considered a violation of the spirit of the agreement. It was from this battle, as well as the events of the Tallet War and the Second Goran War that scholars established the theory of mutually assured destruction, in which it was impossible for any of the three powers to conquer each other due to the fact that they would be completely vulnerable to the third, as was the case in the Goran-Circle Genocide Campaigns. The weapon which the Stoneport defenders used against the Tallet armada was not given in a name in common until it was produced by Ironspire in larger numbers during the Golden Age, at which point, the name "krakoon" was adapted into the name "cannon". Category:History Category:Friendlies Category:Tallet